For the past two years, EMPAC has hosted a residency by The OpenEnded Group, an innovative digital arts collective specializing in the creation of 3D digital works. Now audiences can see the result. Upending, a work commissioned by EMPAC and appearing here in its world premiere, is a revelatory stereoscopic theater performance, an actor–less drama of disorientation and reorientation that compels us to rethink our relationship with the material world. Using ordinary flat photographs and processing them with non-photorealistic rendering and stereoscopic HD video, Upending transfigures familiar objects, spaces, and persons in ways that are both beautiful and uncanny. The play of images is accompanied by a gutsy EMPAC-made recording of Morton Feldman's first String Quartet by the FLUX Quartet, which The New Yorker's Alex Ross describes as “legendary for its furiously committed, untiring performances.” The music provides an aural lens that renders the video almost balletic, even as the visuals allow us to hear Feldman as never before. Listen to a short interview on WAMC with Curator Micah Silver and Paul Kaiser of The OpenEnded Group

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In the late 1960s, Frederic Rzewski left his native U.S. to embark on a 40-year career composing and playing music that addresses not just artistic questions but sociopolitical ones, music meant not just for the conservatory but the street. “It seemed to me,” he explained, “(that) there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners.” Today, Rzewski's compositions display that same audacity, along with a range that encompasses the minimal and the epic. They're political music in the tradition of Cornelius Cardew, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill. And Rzewski plays them with a mastery that can be nothing less than breathtaking. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians calls him “a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.” The performance will be followed by a talk by Frederic Rzewski.

If any one band can heal the rift between the raw and the cooked, artifice and intensity, it's Extra Life. The brainchild of composer and virtuoso guitarist Charlie Looker, the Brooklyn-based quintet plays songs in which zig-zagging guitar lines give way to sudden, dramatic silences and a voice as pure as a choirboy's soars above a rhythm section from hell. Extra Life is “scarily focused and ruthlessly complex . . . with a dark, sumptuous art-pop vibe,” says Time Out New York. “The end product is relentless, enveloping and frequently gorgeous." In the course of his career, Baltimore-based Dan Deacon has evolved from a producer of hypnotic, wordless electronica to a galvanic showman who flails audiences into ecstatic motion. He'll be making good on his thwarted (we're glad he's better) attempt at shaking EMPAC's studios with a wave of exuberant indie noise dance with cohorts Nuclear Power Pants, whose latest album was described as “a warping, Salvador Dali-surreal glob of sneering synth[s]… and dinky, Dark Meat-esque noisemaking.” (City Paper) Nuclear Power Pants have unfortunately cancelled due to the inclimate weather further down the east coast.

Frieder Weiss, creator of the interactive media environment in Chunky Move’s Glow, will talk about his participation in and observations of the ‘dance tech’ genre over the last 15 years. Weiss calls himself an ‘engineer in the arts’. In an entertaining yet critical review, he will describe developments and achievements in the genre of interactive performance, illustrated with numerous videos of works from the recent years. As he will show, not only has the technology changed in this time period, but also the very paradigms of using interactivity have shifted tremendously. Weiss will describe a recipe for successful interactive experiences, including brief overviews and demonstrations of software and hardware systems. Artistic implications will be addressed. Weiss will also be giving an introductory workshop exploring artistic uses of video motion sensing technologies on Saturday December 5th. The workshop is FREE but limited to 15 participants and requires a reservation

For nearly 40 years, Aretha Franklin has been an icon of contemporary pop music, known around the world as the “Queen of Soul.” With her extraordinary range and incendiary gospel-inspired phrasing, Franklin exploded onto the music scene in the late 1960s becoming the country’s leading female vocalist and one of the first female performers to inject the rhythms and intensity of black gospel music into mainstream pop.

Her greatest achievement, perhaps, has been the ability to break down boundaries, to appeal to this country’s vast range of musical tastes.

Per Tengstrand, who was a featured performer at the inaugural concert for EMPAC’s opening, is a Swedish concert pianist who has performed internationally and has a special interest in the relationship between the evolving technology of the piano and development of piano repertoire. During this residency he recorded work for solo piano by Beethoven—an emblematic body of work that evolved in relation to technological shifts in piano design—as part of Tengstrand’s effort to record the complete piano sonata cycle for his Mindfeel label.

Tengstrand performed the complete Beethoven cycle in a number of cities and venues, and blogged extensively about his artistic approach to learning and recording all 32 sonatas, posting detailed analyses of each work demonstrated with short sound files. An advocate of Scandinavian repertoire, in 2005 Tengstrand was decorated by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with the Royal Medal Litteris et Artibus for outstanding service to the arts, the youngest recipient ever to be so honored.

One the world’s few virtuosos of the viola, Garth Knox is known for playing some of the most demanding music written for that instrument with elegance and dash. For this concert, he also performed pieces for the viola d’amore, a 17th century instrument with resonating strings mounted beneath its bowed ones. The program ranged from Tobias Hume’s 1605 Pavane to one of Knox’s own compositions to the world premiere of a new piece for viola d’amore and electronics by English composer James Dillon. A talk with the artist preceded the concert.

Knox studied viola at London’s Royal College of Music and has been a member of Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain and the Arditti String Quartet. As a soloist, he has premiered works by Henze, Ligeti, Schnittke, Ferneyhough, James Dillon, George Benjamin, and many others. Knox was in residence at EMPAC as well to record a work for viola d’amore by the British composer Ed Bennet for My Broken Machines, a CD released in 2011 by NMC Recordings.

One the world’s few acknowledged virtuosos of the viola, Garth Knox is known for playing some of the most demanding music written for that instrument with elegance and dash. On November 14, he’ll also perform pieces for the viola d’amore, a period instrument with resonating strings mounted beneath its bowed ones. The program ranges from Tobias Hume’s 1605 Pavane to one of Knox’s own compositions from his CD Viola Spaces. The evening’s highlight will be the world premiere of a new piece for viola d’amore and electronics by English composer James Dillon under a commission from the French band Art Zoyd. The artist will give a talk before the concert.

In response to the (age-old) complaint that there’s nothing new happening in music, EMPAC modestly announces New Nothing, a series of concerts featuring national and international musicians working in the hybridized terrain of experimental-leaning popular music. These groups exemplify a global reality in which music hasn’t just crossed borders but made them irrelevant, with results that include Nigerian pedal steel guitarists and kora players from Nebraska. Popular music will never be the same. The Brooklyn-based Skeleton$ are not so much a band as “a musical personality,” fronted by founder Matt Mehlan and including a classically-trained trombonist and punk-rock drummers. They’ll be playing their ebulliently noisy music, which Pitchfork magazine characterized as “an outsize global-a-go-go mélange of unceasing polyrhythms, Afrobeat guitars, free jazz, and Timbaland’s approach to kitchen-sink percussion.” The evening also includes a performance by the protean Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist (piano, musical saw, and the Vietnamese dan bau) Luciano Chessa. Among its highlights will be a reading of Futurist poetry and a composition for piano and stuffed animals.

“These days, anything goes…” Zs, the scariest band from EMPAC’s Between a Rock and a Tiny Bell concert, returns on Halloween for a careening set of “[sputtering] Morse code dots of percussion and saxophone” (Ben Sisario, New York Times) as part of the New Nothing series. Opening will be Little Women, a quartet whose ghost notes and violent disassembling of their instruments concoct riotous sets that run the gamut from pop to free jazz to noise and back again.